Tag Archives: Project management

April 18, 2014 · 8:13 am

Thought And Preparation

This is the time of year when many families host some sort of holiday gathering.

Grupp från Bonniers bokförlag vid middagsbord ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It might be a Passover seder or it could be an Easter Sunday gathering.  Our Foodie Friday Fun this week was spurred by that sort of activity.  I’m sure you’ve been to gatherings of this sort where the host had it all together.  The food came to the table all at the same time and at the appropriate serving temperature.  There were no shrieks of “we forgot the rolls” midway through the meal (you rarely hear that at a seder, by the way).  The snacks and drinks are out when guests arrive and the entire experience is executed with efficiency.

I’ve been to meals of a very different sort.  The food comes out one dish at a time and sits on the table until everything is ready, getting cold in the process.  The menu is not quite complete, usually because it wasn’t thought through carefully.  That’s really the point this week – the need for thought and preparation in the kitchen.  Turns out it’s critical in business too.

The two things need to go together for the cook – or businessperson – to be successful.  The hosts who don’t have it all together did think about what to serve.  There was thought.  The problem is that they didn’t translate that thought into preparation.  They didn’t have a real plan.  The opposite is also true.  You can prepare all you want – make various dishes – but without careful thought beforehand, the odds are that you’ll have a meal that just doesn’t work since no one wants all proteins or to have to make a last minute run to the store for the ingredients you didn’t write on your shopping list.

It’s the same in business.  Not taking the time to think a project or situation through before organizing those thoughts into the various types of preparation the enterprise needs to do is futile.  That preparation will have to be redone when something that wasn’t thought through comes to light.  It’s nice when someone volunteers to “dive in” to a project but it’s even better when they make that dive after thinking through the depth of the pool.

I hope if you end up at a gathering of family or friends this weekend you’ll take a step back and appreciate the thought and preparation that went into the day.  If it’s been done well you probably wouldn’t notice it otherwise.  It’s when there isn’t thought and preparation – done together – that you do notice because things go horribly wrong.  Make sense?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Helpful Hints

Tagged as , , , ,

September 5, 2012 · 9:49 am

The One Man Band Battle

I got a note from a regular reader of the screed who was kind enough to send along today’s topic.  I’ll let him tee it up (not, it’s not golf) for you. He’s a smart developer who works solo, like so many of us do these days.  Here’s the situation:

I will be provided with an RFP shortly, along with 4 other entities. Although I think I have the inside track, I am battling the perception from the CEO that I am a one-man-band. My estimation is that the project is 4 man-months of work if I do it single-handedly but the CEO wants to go from RPF to implementation in 2 months.

To win this contract I must partner with others to combat the one-man-band perception and to get the project completed within the desired time-frame.

As a sage man of business, you could probably  give me some good advice on how to battle the negative perceptions so I can win this contract, which I would appreciate. I also think my predicament might serve as good subject matter for your blog.

Indeed it does!  My advice to him was to do a little sales jiu-jitsu – turn the negative into a positive.  In a time when it seems everyone I meet is either a consultant, a contract employee, or even a short-staffed manager, none of us are one man bands.  Everyone I know pulls in additional folks from time to time and I’m willing to bet the CEO (or his managers) do that as well.  A big advantage we independent folks have is that we’re no/low overhead operations.  You’re not paying for a nice building, multiple layers of staff, or large benefit programs.  Most of us are generally very senior and have been fully vetted and battle-tested.  There are no junior people on your account and it’s much easier for us to adjust to the right size team whilst people with entrenched staff can’t just up and hire and fire.

Another big advantage is the trust factor.  Those of us with lengthy high-level careers can generally be trusted to get the job done within the allocated time frame and budget and to let you know ahead of time if it’s going to be an issue.  If the CEO in question is dubious, build in some safeguards – penalties if the job isn’t done on time or additional fees if it’s done ahead of schedule or under budget.

Am I being self-serving here?  Maybe.   Then again, perhaps one can be right and self-serving at the same time.  Hit up the comments and let me know, and keep those topic suggestions coming.

Enhanced by Zemanta

2 Comments

Filed under Consulting

Tagged as , , , , ,

March 2, 2012 · 10:57 am

Making The Doh!

Friday at last, and we’ll do our usual Foodie thing this week with a focus on doh.  That’s not a typo – it’s doh in the Homer Simpson manner:  I want to review a few of the most common mistakes we make in the kitchen.  The inspiration was a recent piece in Cooking Light.  They cited 25 common errors – I’m going to lay out a few this week and maybe we’ll get to some others next week.  Of course, the lessons they teach won’t be restricted to the kitchen either…

Homer Simpson

Image via Wikipedia

The first one is something that I’ll cop to myself : you don’t taste as you go.  Old seasonings, a particularly pungent batch of herbs, how much natural sugar is in the food can all affect the taste of the dish and no recipe can account for all of these things.  You have to taste as you go and adjust.  Of course managers often make that same mistake in their offices – they don’t taste.  What I mean is that to get where they are, managers have followed some sort of recipe and generally have written (in their own minds, if not on paper)  other recipes for how they want things to run.  That’s great, but one has to taste too.  I’ve known bosses who lock themselves away in their offices and don’t wander about among their staff speaking, listening – tasting!

Another mistake:  you don’t read the entire recipe before you start cooking.  This is how you get 6 steps into a dish and realize you’re missing an ingredient or haven’t heated the oven or don’t have the right size pan.  Figuring out a dish takes an hour longer than you have won’t make whomever you’re feeding very happy.  In business, we make that mistake as well.  We agree to deals without getting into the fine points of a contract or we begin projects without really thinking through every step.  That sometimes results in work grinding to a halt as we hit issues that arise but were very predictable had we thought things through in-depth – had we read the whole recipe.

Finally today, we don’t know our oven’s quirks and idiosyncrasies.  Every oven has hot and cool spots.  Baking or roasting without taking those zones into account can result in uneven cooking or over/under done results.  The same is true of your staff.  If we treat each team member’s work habits as the same we get projects done piecemeal or qualitatively unevenly.  Some folks need careful instruction; others need only to be told the basics.  We need to make sure we know how often to check on the progress and adjust based on how things are moving along.

Funny how a kitchen is like an office, even when you’re not a cook!  Better that we stick to making dough and not making DOH!

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under Helpful Hints

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,